Famous Influencers Were Allegedly Paid on a Smear Campaign Against 'Demonic' Candace Owens

A fake 'leaked email' claiming that Turning Point USA paid right-wing influencers to brand Candace Owens 'demonic' has been debunked, but the bitter conservative civil war that spawned it is entirely real.

The viral claim began circulating on X on 25 February 2026, just as the 36-year-old podcaster was preparing to release the first episode of her multi-part YouTube series, Bride of Charlie: An Investigative Series, which targets Erika Kirk, widow of the late Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and the organisation's current chief executive.

The allegation spread rapidly, with some accounts naming prominent figures such as Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro and the popular X account @catturd2 as paid participants in the smear. Multiple fact-checks have since found no evidence to support the claim, and the supposed internal email that started it has been identified as fabricated.

The Fake Email and the Claim That Collapsed Under Scrutiny

The story took off when an X account posted what it claimed was an internal TPUSA document laying out a coordinated messaging campaign against Owens, complete with scripted talking points directing influencers to call her 'evil' and 'demonic.' A follow-up post shared an alleged list of names and payment figures. Within hours, hard-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos claimed on X that he possessed a 'list' of those involved, though no such document was produced or independently verified.

AI fact-checking tool Grok examined the viral table of alleged payments and concluded that while genuine posts from 24–25 February did criticise Owens in harsh terms, there was no evidence of financial transactions or coordinating memos behind them.

Sunday Guardian Live's fact-check, published on 26 February, reached the same conclusion: 'The alleged email that started this claim has been fact-checked and found to be fake. There is zero evidence that anyone was paid or received talking points.'

The near-identical language across numerous critical posts: 'demon,' 'evil,' 'bowels of hell,' fed suspicion of coordination.

The Real Backlash: Organic, Ferocious, and Ideologically Charged

Whatever its origins, the backlash against Owens was neither manufactured nor muted. @catturd2, a pseudonymous X account with four million followers, declared on 25 February that Owens was 'pure evil' and 'a demon straight from the bowels of hell.'

Former UFC fighter Jake Shields mocked the uniformity of the language publicly. Meghan McCain wrote that targeting a woman whose husband had been 'brutally assassinated in front of the entire world' was 'pure, unadulterated, fucking evil.'

Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro, 42, posted a nine-minute video to X calling Owens 'evil trash' for what he described as profiting by 'implicating his widow and everyone else at Turning Point USA' in Charlie Kirk's murder. He went further, urging Erika Kirk to 'sue the living hell out of' Owens. Shapiro's post, captioned simply '.@RealCandaceO is evil,' racked up more than 1.2 million views within 24 hours.

Radio host and Rumble podcaster Dan Bongino went further still. Opening his show on Tuesday, he told his audience that the conservative movement had to 'excise this cancer' and warned that 'no movement can survive this,' urging anyone who supported Owens to 'just get the f–k out' of his audience.

Owens, for her part, dismissed the criticism on X as largely driven by 'Zionists putting in real work hours promoting our upcoming series,' adding that she extended her 'deepest gratitude' for their 'steadfast commitment to hysterics.' Her response did little to dampen the controversy.

Owens, TPUSA, and a Feud Months in the Making

The Bride of Charlie series did not emerge without context. Charlie Kirk was assassinated on 10 September 2025 at Utah Valley University. Tyler Robinson, 22, was arrested and charged with aggravated murder.

Owens, who once worked at TPUSA, has disputed the official account from the outset, alleging on her podcast that the FBI, the French Foreign Legion, the Israeli government, and even TPUSA insiders could be implicated in his death. None of these claims have been substantiated.

Owens accused Erika of suffering 'Meghan Markle syndrome,' alleged a 'strange relationship' between her and a 15-year-old girl, and leaked audio from a January 2026 internal TPUSA call in which Erika discussed merchandise sales and 'numbers and metrics' in what Owens described as a tone that felt 'off-putting' for a recently widowed woman.

Former TPUSA communications staffer Aubrey Laitsch publicly claimed in February that she had been terminated for questioning the official narrative around Kirk's death. 'I just have a gut feeling that I was terminated from Turning Point because I am questioning the narrative of what happened to my role model and CEO, Charlie Kirk, on the day of his assassination,' Laitsch said in a video posted to X.

A Movement Consuming Itself

The episode lays bare a fracture running far deeper than a single docuseries. As NBC News analyst Steve Benen observed in February, 'premier MAGA organisations are being riven by an inability to achieve consensus reality even within their own side of the political spectrum.'

Shapiro had signalled this rupture was coming. At TPUSA's flagship AmericaFest event in December 2025, he accused Owens and Tucker Carlson of 'vomiting hideous and conspiratorial nonsense' about Kirk's death and poisoning the broader movement. Three months on, that conflict has fully detonated and taken much of the conservative online infrastructure with it.

The Bride of Charlie premiered its first episode on 25 February. It received no response from Erika Kirk's office. Whether its claims are eventually tested in a courtroom, as Shapiro has urged, may well determine how much further this fracture runs.